A Heartbreaking Adoption Scam

The adoption of my daughter was a fluke. A miracle. There was never a wait-list or massive amounts of money changing hands. It just happened. Because that's something I frequently write about, I often receive emails from people searching for some magic of their own. But an email I received on February 18th was like nothing I'd encountered before. It sent me on an obsessive quest that would expose an amazingly brazen scam artist — and a crack in the adoption system that all would-be parents should know about. Here's how it all began:

At first I
didn’t know how to respond to this email from "Sarah H."* It’s not
every day that someone writes to you offering her baby for adoption. This "Sarah" had
obviously been reading my blog for a while, as she referred to my hating the
term “birthmother” — something I'd only mentioned a handful of times. I clicked on her blog before replying, and most everything
there seemed fairly legit—including the fact that she had photos available.

But still, I
couldn’t shake the feeling that something might be off. Unfortunately it did
not stop me from sharing this news with a close friend of mine who was also
coming around to the idea of adoption.